Data Rooms & Uploading Documents

The Data Room is a matter's primary document repository — received evidence and discovery documents in litigation, or deal documents in transactional and real‑estate work. Everything you put here is ingested and indexed automatically (see Core Concepts → The content pipeline), so it becomes searchable and available to Emma.

Opening the data room

Select a matter, then open Data Room from the matter's sidebar section. Transactional and real‑estate modes also expose a Data Rooms catalog where you pick a deal to open (or create) its room.

Uploading documents

You can add documents several ways:

• Drag and drop files or folders directly into the data room.
• Chunked upload for large files and bulk sets — uploads resume and report progress.
• Email containers and archives — drop in PST, MBOX, MSG, or ZIP files; Sentinel automatically splits them into their individual messages and attachments during ingestion.
• Media — audio, image, and video files are supported and run through multimodal extraction so their content is searchable.

After upload, each document is processed asynchronously. You'll see it move through processing states (queued → extracting/OCR → embedding → complete) and appear in search once complete. See Core Concepts → What you see while a document is processing.

Organizing

Within a data room you can organize documents into folders, search and filter them, tag them, and open any document for review. For full review features — coding, bulk actions, email threading — open Document Review.

Client upload portal

You can collect documents from a client or third party without giving them an account. Sentinel mints a secure upload link you send to the client; files they upload land in the matter and flow through the same ingestion pipeline. Uploaded files carry provenance — the originating link, the uploader, and an integrity hash — and are marked as a client upload so reviewers can see where a document came from. The upload's processing status is visible to the inviting attorney so you can confirm when the client's documents have finished indexing.

Sharing a data room with an external guest (read‑only)

You can invite an outside party — opposing counsel, a client, a co‑counsel — to view a data room without a tenant account:

1. An admin or attorney invites the guest by email. Sentinel generates a time‑limited invite link.
2. The recipient opens the link and confirms the invited email address at a gate.
3. They get a short‑lived, read‑only session: a document list and inline preview. Guests can view only — they can't edit, tag, or download beyond what the share allows.

Guest access is re‑checked on every request, so revoking a guest takes effect immediately. Guest sharing is managed from the data room's access controls; see Administration → Data‑room guest sharing.

Emailing documents (a lighter alternative). For a one‑off send where the recipient doesn't need ongoing access, you can generate short‑lived, read‑only download links for selected documents and send them by email. This is separate from inviting a guest into the room.

Productions vs. the data room

The data room holds the documents you work with. When you need to formally hand documents to another party — Bates‑numbered and stamped — you build a production from selected documents. See Productions & eDiscovery.

How uploaded content becomes searchable

Regardless of how a document arrives — manual upload, client portal, docket import, or a monitored mailbox — it goes through the same ingestion pipeline and ends up in the same searchable index. There are no separate, unsearchable stores. This is why a deposition transcript, a produced PDF, and a synced email are all findable the same way and all visible to Emma. See Search & Research.